During day two of Nintendo's Treehouse Live stream, more details were announced surrounding the character roster available in Mario Tennis Aces. It was revealed that some new characters are on the way, and there will be a couple of different ways to unlock them for your collection.

The two additional characters revealed were Koopa Troopa and Blooper, both of which will be available this summer. The characters will eventually become available for free in an update, but players will get the chance to unlock them earlier by participating in online tournaments - as long as you earn the required amount of points.

Koopa Troopa will be available for everyone on 1st August, but can be acquired early if you manage to score enough points in the upcoming July tournament. Similarly, Blooper will be available for all in September, but can be received early in an August tournament.

Nintendo hasn't officially confirmed whether or not these tournaments and character unlocks will continue each month, but after last month's datamine which leaked a lot of potential incoming characters, we'd expect to see more in the future.

This character unlocking system seems to be a good way for Nintendo to encourage players to play the game online, hopefully (from its point of view) securing more online service subscriptions in the process before the launch in September.

Do you plan on getting Mario Tennis Aces? Do you like this method for unlocking new characters? Let us know down below.

Ryan’s that annoying kind of guy in multiplayer games - you know the one, the kind of person that throws a temper tantrum if he can’t be Yoshi in Mario Kart or gets stuck with the controller with the dodgy button. Yeah, that kind.

Torn between this or the more serious Tennis World Tour.
Edit: Maybe not, just seen very poor reviews of TWT on other platforms, can't imagine they will have changed anything for the better in the switch port. Mario Tennis it is then.

@MegaMari0 Yeah, so unrealistic. At least it's not an overweight plumber, Turtle Ox thing, sentient ball and chain, an entity who lives in space yet somehow breathes fine in a low oxygen location, a talking mushroom, a money hungry fart factory, a ghost, a regurgitating reptile, a Syngnathidae lizard and, for some reason, a lanky, skinny creepy monster associated with the colour purple who gets asked a lot to be included in Smash.

"This character unlocking system seems to be a good way for Nintendo to encourage players to play the game online, hopefully (from its point of view) securing more online service subscriptions in the process before the launch in September."

So, the characters will be free to win in tournaments, but you'll have to pay to play online in the tournaments starting in September.

Looks like Ninteod is learning from drug dealers - first taste is free.

I don't like this slowly making content available. At least they seem to be free after a time but what happened to just having unlockable characters based on doing things in a game? I can't wait for smash to slowly release 40 of it's characters one month at a time in online tournaments.

@Yorumi First of all, there ARE many just normally unlockable characters in this game. It's not like those two are characters they held back to artificially make the game exciting (I mean, they could be, but I doubt it), they are just additional characters that might have not been in the game, if Nintendo didn't have those possibilities. Also, we don't have to pay for it, so what's the matter with free new content after the game's release?

Also, with Smash... they won't do that. Like, really, they won't do that. I know that was probably ironic... but no... they won't do that. After stating that most characters will have to be unlocked, I'm sure they'll also take the remaining step and give us some good single player unlocking conditions.

@rjejr You'll have to pay for any online services starting September. And Nintendo are not the first ones to do that. If you take that aside, they're just giving additional content for free, while also giving those who are really into the game a chance to play them earlier then those, who are not that much into the game, won't play the online tournaments and thus probably don't really care much about it anyway.

@NDragon1412 Do we know there are normal unlockable characters? That said the whole we're going to lock down content in your game to force you enjoy it longer is just dumb. I guess it works because no one listens to the fact that in splatoon 1 nearly everything the released was already on disc and just locked. So I guess why not if people arn't smart enough to see through it.

Also come september you're gong to have to pay to participate in these tournaments. Of course that's the goal but it's rather annoying honestly.

@Yorumi I agree 100%. The way Nintendo has been doing unlockable characters lately is stupid. I don't want to wait an entire year or longer to be able to play as every character. I want to unlock them through playing the game, not by waiting for Nintendo to hand them out after they've already been locked in the game for months.